How-to: Use text to display an image
by Joey at 5:45 pmCruising through the new edition of Dynamics Graphics magazine, I couldn’t help but notice its latest “How’d they do that?” Because it is a cool effect and it is easy to do, I figured I’d pass it along to any one willing to give it a whirl.
I’ve seen this trick done in Adobe Photoshop several different ways, but of all the methods I’ve seen, this seems to be the easiest in my book. It’s takes very few steps and creates a very nice effect. If you have working knowledge of InDesign, then it shouldn’t take but a few minutes.
First, start off with a blank document. Create a text box within the document and fill it with a selected group of text or just go to Type > Fill with Placeholder Text. From that point, format your text the way you want. In this case, I’m going with GothamCondensed Bold.
Now once you have that complete, select your text box. Go up to Type and select Create Outlines from the drop menu. Then with your box selected, go to Object > Ungroup. Once your text is ungrouped, you should see individual boxes around each line of your text. From there, go up to Object and select Compound Paths > Make. In InDesign CS3, go to Object > Paths > Make Compound Path.
Now, place your photo by going to File > Place and choose the photo you want to use. Once the photo is placed, use the Direct Selection Tool (the white cursor tool in your InDesign toolbar) and click inside on the of the letters.
Now go up to Object and select Fitting > Fit Content Proportionally. This should fill in the photo to the text, giving you a nice text image.
In this case, I placed a black background so that the photo of the beach could pop more. This is nothing new to InDesign or graphic design for that matter, but this is very basic. There is a lot you can do using this technique.
Tags: graphic design, InDesign, photoshop
